Just over two weeks ago, Donald Trump threatened massive tariffs on Mexico and Canada. Then backed off when that boneheaded move caused the stock market to nosedive. When he did so, he declared a 30-day "pause" on these tariffs.
Which means, exactly 2 weeks from today, March 5th, we'll be right back at square one with this dumbfuck blunder all over again. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has vowed to retaliate with a matching 25% tariff on all American goods. Mexico has threatened a similar move.
But I think that's the wrong move on the part of both Canada and Mexico. Here's why:
Remember NAFTA? It was the free trade agreement struck by the USA, Canada, and Mexico during the Clinton administration. And most Americans have since felt that it was a betrayal, causing jobs to be lost here at home and sent abroad more easily. They were right.
So, Trump vowed to do away with NAFTA. It sounded to his supporters like a good idea at the time. But what Trump replaced NAFTA with was "USMCA." That treaty was, in essence, almost a carbon-copy of NAFTA, but with a different name. The rich got to continue to get richer moving jobs abroad, and Trump got to proclaim that he did away with NAFTA, basking himself in glory over the accomplishment when in actuality, he did no such thing.
But USMCA had one key difference: unlike NAFTA, it put huge IP restrictions in place. Essentially, that meant that Mexico had to enact an anti-circumvention law making it a crime to tamper with "digital locks." So Mexican mechanics can't bypass the digital locks US car companies use to lock-out third party repair, Mexican farmers can't fix their own tractors, and Mexican software developers can't make alternative app stores for mobile devices. Instead they MUST sell their software through US Big Tech companies like Apple or Android, and they take a massive 30% cut of every sale. Canada was also forced to embrace similar restrictions, but unlike Mexico, most of them were already in place by 2012. It was worth it, they reasoned, to pay Apple or Android 30% on all apps in order to not have to pay a tariff on a new smart phone.
So, here's a radical idea: Instead of Mexico and Canada retaliating with mirror-tariffs on the U.S. why don't they retaliate a different way? Why don't they simply toss out the IP restrictions instead?
Consider what that move does: Apple and Android can no longer reap the huge benefits of having a monopoly on apps. Canada and Mexico can begin to reap the economic benefits of being able to jail-break machines and devices. American farmers will begin using Mexican or Canadian software to repair their own equipment (which should have remained their right in the first place!). Mexican and Canadian apps will circumvent the 30% cut Apple takes with the apps it produces. Americans would flock to this new market to obtain more affordable software, and more importantly, be able to move around their own music collections with ease, not having to pay Apple or Spotify a subscription just to be able to use the property which is already rightfully theirs. Canadians and Mexicans could even make affordable apps for X-Box and Playstation. And any Tesla vehicle could be repaired at home without having to pay one of Elon Musk's official repair facilities.
In short, it's a move that hits the oligarchs who put Trump in office right in the 'nads!
I can't claim to have come up with this idea first. This actually comes from the remarkable brain of Cory Doctorow, the man who coined the term "enshittification," and one of the small percentage of humans who is demonstrably smarter than me. If you want to read his original essay on the matter, you can read it here. It's really not that dissimilar to the way Ukraine cashed in on being able to jail break John Deere tractors, only on a more massive scale.
Imagine being able to buy a jailbreaking kit that frees your printer from subscription services and the anti-competition features that detect third-party printer ink? Imagine color toner cartridges that actually become affordable through Canadian dealers. Imagine how so many other forms of software, from Adobe to Zoho, becoming ownable for ONE payment instead of forced subscriptions paid out month after month, year after year! Imagine Canadian streaming devices which are coded to get around the limits of 6 or 7 household users per streaming service, allowing dozens and dozens of people to stream more affordably!
I like the prospect of such an outcome. And if Trudeau is smart, this is what he'll do. Retaliatory tariffs of 25% will hurt Canada far more than it will hurt the U.S., mostly because Canada relies so much more on American imports than vice-versa. But reversing the IP laws and jail-breaking the technology is simply giving us all something that should always have been ours in the first place! That's a brilliant move which will net Canada huge economic benefits, and wreak maximum hurt on the American pro-Trump oligarchs, especially Elon Musk.
Hopefully, someone in Canada is at least paying attention to Cory Doctorow, if not to me.
Eric
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